"Battletech..." Topic

Been a Battletech fan for years and just got the new starter by Catalyst Games…mini's are decent, clean, easy to paint up. Fun too as well, especially with my two younger boys.

Now, if I wanted to get one of Technical readouts, which one covers more of the Mechs…such as the Atlas, Madcat and so on.

Thanks

Depends on what era you want to fight. Basic is 3025 Readout, and will include all the classics. If you prefer clan era, get 3050. Everything else you can ignore for now- those are the primary books for the two most popular eras, and both will give you many mecha to fight for some time to come.

I'm glad you're having fun with the new box, it's been a hit with my group as well.

By starter do you mean the Beginner Box, or Battletech: A Game Of Armored Combat? Because if you only have the beginner set you should probably go buy AGOAC before you get anything else so that you'll have the main rules that most other things require.

If you already have AGOAC, then the your next step should be a PDF set of record sheets for the era you're interested in, I suggest Record Sheets: Succession Wars link Which covers the Inner Sphere during most of the pre-clan invasion era, and should be fully compatible with the AGOAC rules (The Atlas is an Inner Sphere mech that predates the clan invasion).

If you're instead interested in the Clan invasion era (The Mad Cat/Timber Wolf is a clan design), I'd either become a late backer of the kickstarter link or wait until the new box is in stores sometime next year (They're also making more Inner Sphere mech in the kickstarter, if you want them in plastic.) If you don't feel like waiting or want to play even later eras like the Jihad, you could either purchase the Battletech Manual (if you desire more mech based rules), or Total Warfare (if you want to try combined arms with tanks and infantry among other things), both will have additional rules you'd need to run clan tech, though you'd still need record sheets for the era that you're playing in.

Technical readouts, though excellent sourcebooks, don't really allow you to field mechs by themselves. They're more like Jane's Recognition Guides than rulebooks, and much of the info they contain is also available on Sarna.net (The battletech wiki).

Right now the TR that will give you most mileage is the 3050 one, as it features most Inner Sphere mechs and the Clans.

3025 is very useful if you prefer to keep to the basic side of the game, whereas almost of all the later ones build on these two main ones, adding more mechs for all the factions at some later time period, the further up the scale you go the more advanced the tech becomes, culminating in the 3150 era where tech is now a solid blend of IS and Clan.

"Technical readouts, though excellent sourcebooks, don't really allow you to field mechs by themselves."

Did they remove the stats from the TRs? My friends and I pretty much ran BT for years just off the original 3025 and 3050 TRs and the core boxes.

I dunno…that WOULD be pretty awful.

Whatever happened to the computer program that would print out a Mech record sheet for any and all Mechs in the game?

Is that Mech Factory? mech-factory.soft112.com

Played classic Battlerech when it first came out as Battledroids. The starter set had card board stand up counters. There were no minis yet.

It was an easy game to sale at my store since it used the hit system that Car Wars and SFB used.

Gokiburi- I got the A Game of Armoured Combat. The recent one from Catalyst Games.

Thanks for advice so far gang. Appreciate it :D

There's the SkunkWerks: solarisskunkwerks.com/about

And the Master Unit List:
link
But I think this prints out Alpha Strike cards.

TR's never had mech sheets in them, but they contained enough information for you to fill out your own mech sheet. Or you could pick up one of those "reinforcements" mech sheet packs, which is what we did.

It looks like that hasn't changed much since the 90's, but there are sites (as linked) that will help you out, like mech factory.

Catalyst has published a lot of the mech sheets on the web page though. Just dig around some, and you can find sheets for anything that was in AGOAC.

Master Unit List seems to be mostly for Alpha Strike. Which suits me fine, since that's what I'm playing these days. :)